‘Yomi Ayeleso | Ado-Ekiti
Ekiti State governor, Biodun Oyebanji, has identified what he described as politicisation of school fees by political leaders as one of the causes of crisis and challenges confronting the Ekiti State University (EKSU), Ado-Ekiti.
He said a situation where school fees were reduced for political reasons without recourse to or consultation with council and management in order to arrive at realistic fees chargeable would always lead to crisis.
He stressed the need for all the stakeholders of the institution to have a meeting where the development and repositioning of the institution would be discussed and bring an end to all the problems once and for all.
The governor spoke while receiving a delegation of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) led by its vice president, Akinteye Babatunde, in his office who came to seek his intervention in the tuition fee issue in the university.
Oyebanji, an alumnus of the institution, promised that his administration would reposition the university as a centre of academic excellence with a strategic collaboration with the university council, management and unions, students body, parents and other stakeholders.
He said he had to constitute the university council after rigorous but careful consultation and came up with people he believed could add value to the institution and help to solve the myriad of problems bedevilling it.
He assured that his government would do what is administratively possible to return EKSU to its pride of place and save it from total collapse as he would not want to be seen as usurping the power and responsibility of the university council and that of the management.
According to him, “I’m obligated to EKSU, EKSU produced me and I’m proud of it. So, I plead with you to show patience and see what we are going to do, because I have confidence in the ability of the newly appointed council members to bring to bear their wealth of experience in ensuring that we have a university that works, a university that makes you proud and which guarantees a stable educational system.
“As a government, we are working so hard to ensure that we get electricity to that place, we are constructing the road to Iworoko. Part of the reason why we are doing that is to ensure that you have thoroughfare to campus and we’ve spent billions of Naira on that road just to make life easy for you.
“EKSU is sick, extremely sick and it’s in ICU and we have a choice to either leave it to die and close it down or we attempt a revival of that institution.
“One thing I can assure you is that we can’t be emotional about the problem in EKSU, students complain that they don’t graduate on time, workers are not paid regularly. You spoke about subvention.
“We have a choice either to push for a 21st century institution or a glorified secondary school, I went to the same university and I knew how it was then compared to now with respect to quality of education not minding the physical structures. I don’t know if you are aware, Mr Vice President, that for the past ten years, EKSU has no electricity despite having students studying Engineering and Computer Science; last week I demanded for what it will cost government to extend that state’s IPP to the university and they said it will cost N500 million, I will rather do that than ask the university to bear the cost.
“The reason I am saying this is for you to know that we have a stake in the University because most of the cabinet members including myself were alumni of EKSU. I have an endowment of N250,000 in the institution for the best student. So, all of us are critical stakeholders in that University.”
Earlier, the Vice President of NANS, Comrade Babatunde requested the intervention of the Governor to make EKSU management reverse the hike in the tuition of the institution saying education was a right of every Nigerian and should not be allowed to be commercialized.
Akinteye noted that high tuition fees of the institution has led to drastic reduction to student enrolment at EKSU stressing the need for government to increase subvention to the institution to enable it meet its responsibility to its workers and offset its debt of N13 billion.
